Bowling may be key to Blue Comets snapping skid

Bowling may be key to Blue Comets snapping skid

Maybe that was the key all along for the Asheboro High School boys varsity basketball team, which has been battling a month-long slump.

Asheboro got back in the winners’ column Friday night with a 66-52 Mid-Piedmont Conference win over Central Davidson.

The Blue Comets entered Friday night’s game with the Spartans on a slide, losing seven of their last eight games. Their conference and overall records had slipped to .500 and head coach Brian Nance had tried about everything. So on Tuesday, the day after a loss to Salisbury, he took his team bowling. They left the basketballs in the gym and went bowling as a team.

“We just left everything in the gym and went out and had fun,” Nance said. “We may be going bowling once a week now.

“We played with a lot more effort,” Nance added. “We had guys hitting the floor, battling on the boards. Just the hard play and effort and playing with intensity allowed us to extend the lead throughout the game.”

Nance also used a platoon system with each five-man team trying to outdo the other. It seemed to work.

“We were playing Central Davidson, but I told them they were playing against each other and to see which five could extend the lead,” Nance said. “The second group was trying to do better than the first group and the first group would then try and do better than the second.”

AHS (4-3, 10-9) led 18-11 after the first quarter, 33-23 at halftime and 47-36 after three quarters.

“It was fun to watch and they looked like they cared,” Nance said.

Jake Hall had 11 points, Kameron Grady, Tazmine Dunn and Emmanuel Jones 10 each and Robert Bittle had eight.

In the girls game, AHS recorded a 58-23 win over the Spartans, a team that had defeated them the first time the two teams played. AHS (4-3, 14-5) led 31-8 at halftime and cruised.

“They came out ready to play tonight,” AHS coach Terry Allmon said. “We put pressure on them from the beginning. It was one of our better games all around.”

Laycee Baughman, Jasmine Trogdon and Courtney King each had 12 points for AHS.